‘No, no,’ she whispered.
As water started to fill the inside, the car tilted more. She had to put her hands flat on the dashboard to keep herself in the seat as the car shifted forward. With one hand on the dashboard, she pushed with the other on the door, but she couldn’t get it to open. The front part of the door, at the bottom, was catching on the surface of the ice.
‘Please, no.’
The last crack she heard was the loudest, echoing across the lake like a thunderclap.
The front end of the car dropped suddenly. Water rushed in, now swirling around her knees. Then it was at her waist. Next it reached her neck. Then everything became very black, and very cold, and then, in a strange way, very calm.
Her last thoughts were of her daughter, and the grandchild she would never see.
‘Melissa,’ she whispered.
And then the car was gone.
One
Keisha
Keisha Ceylon stared at the house and thought, sometimes you could tell, just by looking at a place, that there was hurt inside.
She was sitting in the car with the engine running so that she could keep the heater on. Keisha was sure her feelings about the house were not affected by what she already knew. She told herself that if she’d just been walking past, and had merely glanced at this home, she’d have picked up something.
Despair. Concern. Fear.
All the same, there wasn’t anything to mark this house out from any other on the street. The only difference was that the inch of snow that had fallen overnight had not been cleared from the drive, nor from the path up to the front door. In addition, the curtains were drawn and the blinds shut.
Keisha thought about what the man who lived in the house must be feeling. How was he dealing with it? Was he at the point where he would be desperate enough to accept, and pay, for the very special service she could provide?
She believed her timing was about right. This was always the tricky part – knowing when to make a move. You couldn’t act too quickly, but you didn’t want to leave it too late, either. If you waited too long, the police might actually find a body. If that happened, no upset relative was going to care what kind of visions Keisha Ceylon might be having that would lead them to the body. A fat lot of good her visions would do then.
You had to get hold of these people while they still had hope. As long as they had hope, they were willing to try anything and throw their money at anything. This was even more true when all the usual methods – door-to-door questions, sniffer dogs, patrols from the air, searches of the local area – hadn’t found anything.
That’s when the relatives were open to something a bit out of the ordinary. They might warm to a nice lady who showed up on their doorstep and said, ‘I have a gift, and I want to share it with you.’
For a price, of course.
The other important thing about timing was the competition. If Keisha didn’t move fast enough, if she didn’t get to the family soon, she ran the risk of getting beaten by Winona Simpson.
That bitch.
Winona Simpson had been doing this for nearly as long as Keisha – the whole ‘I have a vision’ thing. The difference was that Winona really believed. The woman was actually convinced she’d been blessed with some special power – an ability to see things that no one else could see. It drove Keisha nuts. What’s more, because Winona really believed it was her mission to help people in their time of need, she always charged less than Keisha for her work.
‘I’m not in this to make money,’ she’d once told Keisha. It was when they’d both had their sights set on a couple whose two-year-old daughter had wandered away and was believed to have drowned in a creek a year and a half ago. ‘I want to help these people. All I ask is that they cover my expenses, which are minimal.’
‘You must be joking,’ Keisha’d told her.
Keisha had lost out that time, because Winona had already spoken to the parents. She told them where she believed the child was. However, before they could get to the location, a father and son playing with a radio-controlled boat found the child’s body lodged under a bridge. It was exactly where Winona had said it would be.
Keisha wondered how the hell she did it. She didn’t want to believe that Winona really had the gift, but some things were very hard to explain. Keisha was pretty sure Winona had not beaten her this time around.
The missing woman’s name was Eleanor Garfield. She was, according to the news reports, white, forty-one years old and five foot three. She weighed about a hundred and fifty pounds and had short black hair and brown eyes.